Do CPG Brands Need a Podcast?
CEO: “I run a CPG brand, CPG brands don’t have podcasts. The Coca-Cola Company doesn’t have a podcast.”
Me: “First of all, you’re not Coca-Cola, no offense, and yes they do. It’s called Total Refresh.”
CEO: “Oh… I guess I need a podcast.”
(not a real conversation) 😁
I get that there are a lot of podcasts out there, but guess what, there’s a lot of everything out there.
You may be standing the sandy shores right now, staring out at an ocean in front of you thinking, “What could I possibly do to get discovered. What’s the point?”
You can either give up, or you can dive in and start paddling.
Branding and content marketing are not easy, they take a long time, they are impossible to measure, they’re expensive… but they’re the way.
There are no shortcuts in business. There’s no easy mode for growth.
Strategies for Improving Your Content Marketing
Too often B2B companies create content and just post it on their company page. But it hardly ever reaches their audience organically.
To overcome this, I would suggest:
Social media – have staff, especially the CEO, post on their social pages, and also post in groups where your audience hangs out.
I posted something about SEO once on my LinkedIn page and it got 200 impressions and 1 like. That’s because my LinkedIn connections don’t care about SEO as much as I do. I posted that same post in a marketing group and it got 10,000+ impressions, hundreds of comments and likes, new connection requests…
Also, just because you post it once, it doesn’t mean you can post it again. You can reschedule it, change the title, change the feature graphic, etc.
I called this the three Rs of Content – Reuse, Remix, and Repurpose.
Paid promotion – put a little ad spend behind it and target it to your audience. It doesn’t have to be much, $20 – $100 per post can often be enough to guarantee it’ll be put in front of the right people. Again, going back to what I first said – is it something the audience would care about? Does it have an engaging title? Does the cover art looking interesting and appealing? Lots to consider here.
Too often when companies hit publish, they move onto the next one, and hope and pray that their post will organically take on a life of its own and go off into the world and do what it needs to do.
Sadly, this is rarely the case.
Once you hit publish, that content should go in a spreadsheet and you should set some time aside every month to monitor what each post did in terms of impressions, engagement, and so on. There are many other things you need to do as well such as uploading it to Google Search Console, SEO optimization, rescheduling, A/B testing, and planning what happens next.
Repurposing content is huge – can we turn this thing into something else (or better yet, 10 other things)? Could it be a video, or a podcast topic, or a webinar, or an infographic, or can we post it on Medium or LinkedIn Pulse, or create social posts from it…? Essentially you want to tailor your content for each platform, considering the format and style.
Partnerships and Collaborations can be a great way to amplify content – they can post it on their channels and you could do the same for theirs. Partners are those who share a common audience but are not competitors.
Newsletters can be a great way to distribute content, but too often companies neglect the most important part – collecting emails. There is a whole strategic initiative in and of itself with this, which I won’t go into.
In terms of long form video content, that needs to be chopped up into smaller clips for Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok videos. There is a whole methodology here.
- Related post: The T-Shirt Theory of Branding
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- Related post: Why You Don’t Want to Run a Business that Relies Solely on Ads
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If you follow us on social or read our blog, you may have noticed that we talk A LOT about the branding, the importance of branding, how branding is like gravity, how you either have a commodity or a brand…
We also talk a lot about storytelling marketing – in fact we have an entire page dedicated to it as it’s one of our core services. We go on at length about why brands need to tell stories (so that consumers can align their values to the brands they support), and dispelling the myths about storytelling marketing.
We also talk about how consumers don’t buy products, they join tribes. Check out some of our related posts.